Point-form updates

• I harvested my first zucchini a couple days ago – fresh as a summer's rain.
• My pole beans turned out in fact to be bush beans. I harvest beans from them every couple days, but they're not producing much, and some of the leaves are yellowing. I don't think they're getting as much sun as they need.
• My friend Jen visited a few days ago and she helped me transplant quite a few lettuce and spinach seedlings, and more are on the way. I keep harvesting lettuce, so there's always more room to plant.
• I keep having to tighten the trellises for my tomatoes; the fabric they're made of is gradually getting stretched. They're pretty effective, though. No longer are the neighbouring onions gasping for sunlight.
• Every day I gently steer a few pumpkin or melon vines to follow the trellises or directions I want. I'm trying to aim them north, out to the back lane where there's space, but they're naturally inclined to grow the other direction, towards the sun.
• I'm still picking off the leaf miner-attacked fragments of my chard leaves on a regular basis.
  
• I mounded up my potatoes a while ago. I couldn't find another tire for one of the stacks, so I made do with bits of brick I've collected from the yard over the summer, which I laid around the edges of the topmost tire. Soon I'm going to have to come up with another solution, though.
  

A-trellising we will go

I got back from my trip, and my garden was still intact! Meta was watering every day, apparently, and there were three significant rainfalls. The only casualty was the spinach plant I'd been trying to save for seed, which was a wilted puddle of yellow when I came home. It was already going that direction before I left, and I have no idea why. I actually saved two spinach plants for seed, and they both did the same thing. Too much heat, maybe?

But that also meant that my tomatoes and pumpkins were getting out of control. One tomato plant had grown so big and toppled over, smothering the onions, basil and poppies. I had to do some trellising, which is what I spent today doing.

I posted two stakes at each end of the tomato bed and tied two lines of twine (made of recycled jeans) between them. This propped up the tomato plants pretty well, but I spent some time perfecting the arrangement by gently maneuvering the delicate branches between the lines.

I also got a tip at Everdale about dealing with yellowing lower tomato branches. Apparently it's a form of blight that is contracted through contact with the soil. As long as you remove the lower branches, you'll be fine. But you have to wash your hands thoroughly after touching infected branches before touching the rest of the plant.

The flax was also a little flimsy and falling onto the pathways, so I staked some small bamboo stakes around the flax patch and tied some wool around them to keep the stalks upright.

My pumpkin, melon, and cucumbers were also starting to sprawl, so I found random branches and stuck them around the plants in various configurations until they were sturdy, and gently convinced the squash plants to climb up them.

The corn cobs are ripening!